Auf dem Gletscher Kitzsteinhorn: Skiing in the Austrian Alps!

I always forget how much I love to ski until I get back into it. So this past weekend of skiing on a glacier in the Austrian Alps was one of the most fantastic trips I've had while abroad, if not the most fantastic! We left Vienna on Friday morning and drove for five hours to the Salzburg region of the Austrian Alps. The ride was very beautiful, as more and more snowcapped mountains kept popping up along the way. In order to feel more authentic, we were also staying in a rustic, cabin-like hotel! We settled into our respective rooms after picking up our ski and snowboard rental equipment from the cute little town nearby and having dinner at the hotel (IES is back to picking our meals again, meaning all the vegetarian dishes I get are not very tasty...). Amanda, Sara, Megan, and I shared an enormous suite, complete with a sitting room, balcony, and view of the impressive mountains. We got very lucky! Some people had much smaller rooms and not a great view.

View of the mountains!

Saturday dawned bright and early and we all filled up on breakfast so we were ready to hit the slopes. We were only a five minute drive from the mountain base, so we got there quickly and unloaded our skis. Steph had a bit of a brain freeze and thought someone had taken her skis, so we dealt with that mishap for a while, before she found out that she had just remembered the incorrect number on her skis and those actually were hers. We had a good laugh about that! 

The gondola rides (there were two!) to the top where the Alpincentre was (like the base where ski lifts started) were quite long and a bit tightly packed, but the views were stunning! The higher we got, the more impressive, and the less trees there were. It looked like we had fallen into a National Geographic photograph!

View from the Alpincentre base

It took a while for Megan, Sara, Amanda, Steph, and I to get organized, but we eventually managed to get our boots and helmets on, both gloves on our hands and hand warmers for our pockets and head up yet another gondola to the very top of the mountain. I became a bit queasy. I wasn't able to stand in that cramped gondola...instead I was stuck leaning against a middle-aged man's snowboard. It was so stuffy. We finally made it to the top, only to take a quick tram downwards to the actual slopes. It was a bit of an ordeal getting to the runs!

Snow was still falling, as it was when we woke up in the morning. Turns out, even though we were very high up, there were still clouds above us. The mountain was completely white and it was difficult to see anything. It was quite pretty and peaceful having the snow fall all around us, but it didn't help us with our warm up run. In Europe, the easy to hard levels are blue, red, black, compared to America's green, blue, black. We intended to start out with a simple blue, just to get warmed up, but the thick snow obscured our vision and we shot down the first run we saw, which turned out to be a red. It wasn't terribly difficult, but seeing anything was! I was worried I'd have to spend the entire day straining my eyes to see through the swirling snow. Luckily, it cleared up by our second run.

Skiing through the clouds!

The five of us spent the entire morning skiing a few blues and many red runs. It was so much fun, especially when the clouds disappeared beneath us and the snow stopped. The views were breathtaking. Some of our runs took a long time because we just had to keep stopping and taking pictures. It was too beautiful to ignore!

I'm not used to skiing in a place with absolutely no evergreen trees around, so it threw me a little bit. It truly felt like we were at the summit of the mountain, which we were! I just couldn't wrap my head around the fact that I was skiing on a glacier in the Austrian Alps!

On top of the world

We took a break for lunch around 1:30pm and by the time we'd finished, thick clouds were rolling in again. Nevertheless, we headed out again. On the chair lift up, we realized we couldn't see anything. Skiers were magically appearing from the mist below us without warning. When we got off, we could barely see our hands. We were in the middle of a cloud! It was pretty cool to experience, but skiing down cautiously was very difficult. We couldn't see any of the powdery moguls to avoid nor signs nor each other! By the time we finally made it down, our hair and even Steph's eyelashes had been frozen over and were white with little icicles. It was time to call it a day and head home to relax in our rustic cabin-rooms.

The gondolas on the left take you up and down the mountain

The next morning was beautifully clear. I knew we were going to have a fabulous day for skiing. The five of us got organized a bit quicker today, though we started skiing later, at about 10:15. We explored a few different red runs, and even braved a short black, while Megan and Sara went off together to tackle Black Mamba. I definitely wasn't feeling that. We got even more extraordinary photographs, both from the observation deck at the summit of the Alps and just while skiing down the mountains. That mountain air was so refreshing and the views so breathtaking, that I've decided this weekend of skiing has been my favorite weekend in Austria! I can't wait to beg Dad to let us go on a ski holiday (I'm positive he'd jump at the chance!).

Die Alpen

View from the observation deck!